Ted Wilson obituary

My father, Ted Wilson, who has died aged 78, was a pioneering particle physicist at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva and a visiting professor at Oxford University.

In 1967, Ted worked with Sir John Adams on one of the first giant particle accelerators, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), which is 7km in circumference and stretches across the border between Switzerland and France. Revolutionary for its time - it was a predecessor of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the SPS was switched on in 1976 and led to the discovery of the W and Z boson particles. It remains the second largest machine in Cern's accelerator complex, after the LHC.